BOOK I. lightened by experience, has presumably greater truth. And against such a judgment, whether of Dependence of praise or blame, it is impossible to set up the plea, $ 57. consciousness on nerve movement. that the nerve movements follow and combat each other by natural fixed laws, which we did not make and cannot alter, and that in this way we are under compulsion, for it is these same nerve movements, in the same organ, and under the same laws, which now pronounce the judgment against which we would appeal; that is, which support those very states of consciousness which we call condemnation or acquittal. Necessity can no more be pleaded against the censure or punishments of conscience, than the same necessity against the judgments or punishments of law. 15. Approval or disapproval of past volitions is a judgment of the comparative character of states of consciousness, the series of which is a self-determined redintegration. Moral approval or disapproval of them is judgment of their comparative character in respect to the moral sense. And although it is requisite to both kinds of judgment that the objects of them should be self-determined series of states of consciousness, and although in such cases of self-determined action there may always be a sense of freedom, which consists in the perception of the balance of motives without knowing its issue, yet neither this sense of freedom, nor a supposed fact of freedom behind it, other than the fact of self-determination, is any part of the ground for passing judgments of approval or disapproval. The character of the conscious states themselves, not the character of the mechanism which moves them, is the object of all judgments of praise or blame, and of moral judg ments among them. BOOK I. CH. III. § 57. consciousness on nerve movement. Neither in fact, therefore, nor in logic is there an escape from the tribunal of conscience, when conceived as a mode of voluntary red- Dependence of integration supported by nerve movements. There are not two orders of phenomena, acting and reacting on each other, or having the phenomena of the one alternating in one series with those of the other; nerve movements causing feelings, and these in turn causing nerve movements; but there is one order only, of nerve movements evidenced by states of consciousness; and these are at one time preferences, at another judgments on those preferences, both supported by the same series of nerve movements. The nerve movements make us choose; they also make us judge our choice; a phenomenon of consciousness equally real, and, it may be added, equally real with the nerve movements themselves. 16. The sense of freedom, as known to us by the reflective perception of self-determination, is the perception of the fact that we are self-determined, without the perception of the issue of the self-determination. Such is the analysis of what we perceive in perceiving that we are free, the analysis of the sense of freedom or of freedom itself. This brings us back to the moment indicated in § 2 as the moment of distinction between accomplished fact and practical action, the moment which is the turning point of ethical problems. It is the moment which is the junction, or the separation, of what is necessary and what is contingent in action. Necessity and contingence are terms which have meaning only subjectively; they refer to our knowledge of facts. Therefore, since in the moment of choice we know only the past and not the future, not the BOOK I. CH. III. § 57. consciousness on nerve movement. issue of the choice, no action that lies in choice is necessary. It cannot be known to be determined Dependence of this way or that by particular causes, because the determining causes act only through the moment of choice, and the choice itself is the determination of the issue. The causes which determine it are nerve movements, the respective force of which is known only by the issue of their conflict. The physical laws of movement themselves thus produce, or evolve out of themselves, in supporting the phenomena of consciousness, the distinction between the necessary and the contingent, and place the limit between them at the point or moment of conscious action, the point or moment which separates the past from the future. $ 58. Distinction the cerebrum. § 58. 1. There is a class of questions still remainof functions in ing to complete the present branch of our enquiry, the questions relating to the physiological distribution of functions within the cerebral hemispheres, which have been already distinguished as the organ of immanent processes of redintegration of pure representations and of the emotions pervading them. Two orders of questions were distinguished in § 51, as of special interest to metaphysic, those relating to the nature of nerve movements, and those relating to. the assignment of organs to distinct functions in consciousness. Questions of the first of these two orders, in respect of the cerebral hemispheres, have already been included, so far as our knowledge reached, in the analysis of the processes of redintegration spontaneous and voluntary. It remains to see whether any probable hypothesis is afforded by the results of that analysis, in regard to questions of the second order. In other words, Does the analysis of func tions and processes in the cerebral hemispheres suggest any hypothesis, and what, as to distinct portions of the organ being the seats of separate functions and processes? 2. It is natural to suppose, in the first place, that a difference in function implies a difference in position of the organ appropriated to it, since the difference of function depends on a difference of nerve movements, and those nerve movements which are most fitted mutual action and reaction would, by frequency of repetition, tend to consolidate or group themselves together, and take gradually exclusive possession of the portion of nerve substance in which they arise; especially if we remember that such movements are only performed on condition of waste and reparation, by a new growth of nerve substance in place of the old. Increasing organisation seems on this ground to involve increasingly minute separation of parts locally in the organism. And this tendency would be probable independently of an original conformation of organs in the same direction; which conformation might, on the contrary, be itself in turn regarded as the result, hereditarily transmitted, of a previous action of such tendencies. At any rate, our hypothesis of location of organs must be based upon differences of function and process, since there is no original conformation which we can assume as a starting point, or known as contributing to determine differences in function and process. 3. The movements of representation of images received from below, and those which we must suppose original to the cerebral hemispheres themselves, on the meeting and stimulation of the latter by the former, combine into total movements which pro BOOK I. § 58. Distinction of functions in the cerebrum. BOOK I. § 58. Distinction of functions in duce or support the states of consciousness known as emotions and images or frameworks of emotion, emotion and framework being two elements of each the cerebrum. of the conscious states. Volition in reasoning and volition in choice, which ends in passion, are cases of the same process, conflict of nerve movements, different from each other only as they are displayed in cases where either the emotional or the representational element predominates over the other. No state of consciousness however is exclusively emotional or exclusively representational; and therefore no state is exclusively one of passion, or exclusively one of reason. The combination of the movements from the two sources, from the cerebrum and from the organs of the first and second groups, is an universal fact, issuing in every instance in states of consciousness which combine both the elements, emotion and imagery. 4. But although there is this fusion between the two kinds of movement and between their products in consciousness, it does not follow that they are always mixed in the same proportion. It has been shown on the contrary, that either element may predominate to all but the exclusion of the other; and this in cases both of spontaneous and voluntary redintegration, and of both strong and feeble volition. So that no sooner is the fusion effected, in the cerebral processes, than a new dispersion and distinction of processes and their conscious states appears to begin. 5. If we look at the specific content of the different states in redintegration, there is a similar variability between their two elements. The question must have occurred to every one, during the analysis |